“No, do go. I hope he’s all right. Was he upset?”
“He woke up and said something about a fire engine. Good-morning, to you all,” snorted Mrs. Forrester and left them.
She had scarcely gone when Hilary himself uttered a stifled scream. He had risen and was leaning over the bannister. He pointed downwards like an accusing deity at a heap of broken porcelain lying near a standard lamp.
“God damn it!” Hilary said, “that’s my K’ang Hsi vase. Who the hell’s broken my K’ang Hsi vase!”
“Your K’ang Hsi vase,” Alleyn said mildly, “missed my head by a couple of inches.”
“What do you mean? Why do you stand there saying things with you arm in your chest like Napoleon Bonaparte?”
“My arm’s in my chest because the vase damn’ nearly broke it. It’s all right,” Alleyn said, catching Troy’s eye. “It didn’t.”
“Very choice piece, that,” Mr. Smith observed. “Famille verte. You bought it from Eichelbaum, didn’t you? Pity.”
“I should bloody well think it is a pity.”
“Insurance O.K.?”
“Naturally. And cold comfort that is, as you well know. The point is, who did it? Who knocked it over.” Hilary positively turned on his beloved. “Did you?” he demanded.
“I did not!” she shouted. “And don’t talk to me like that. It must have been the cat.”
“The cat! How the hell —”
“I must say,” Alleyn intervened, “a cat did come belting downstairs immediately afterwards.”
Hilary opened his mouth and shut it again. He looked at Cressida, who angrily confronted him, clutching her eider-down. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My darling. Forgive me. It was the shock. And it was one of our treasures.”
“I want to go to bed.”
“Yes, yes. Very well. I’ll take you.”
They left, Cressida waddling inside her coverlet.
“Oh dear!” said Mr. Smith. “The little rift what makes the music mute,” and pulled a dolorous face.
“Your room’s next to hers, isn’t it?” Alleyn said. “Did you hear any of this rumpus?”
“There’s her bathrom between. She’s got the class job on the northeast corner. Yes, I heard a bit of a how-d’yer-do but I thought she might be having the old slap-and-tickle with ’Illy. You know.”
“Quite.”
“But when she come screeching down the passage, I thought Hullo-ullo. So I come out. Gawd love us,” said Mr. Smith, “it’s a right balmy turn-out though, and no error. Good-night again.”
When he had gone Alleyn said, “Come out of retirement,” and Troy emerged from the background. “Your arm,” she said. “Rory, I’m not interfering, but your arm?”
With a creditable imitation of the Colonel, Alleyn said: “Don’t fuss me, my dear,” and put his right arm round his wife. “It’s a dirty great bruise, that’s all,” he said.
“Did somebody —?”
“I’ll have to look into the Pussyfoot theory and then, by Heaven, come hell or high water, we’ll go to bed.”
“I’ll leave you to it, shall I?”
“Please, my love. Before you do, though, there’s a question. From your bedroom window, after the party, and at midnight, you looked out and you saw Vincent come round the northeast corner of the house. He was wheeling a barrow and in the barrow was the Christmas tree. He dumped the tree under the Colonel’s dressing-room window. You saw him do it?”
“No. There was an inky-black shadow. I saw him coming, all right, along the path. It’s wide, you know. More like a rough drive. The shadow didn’t cover it. So along he came, clear as clear in the moonlight. Against the snowy background. And then he entered the shadow and I heard him tip the tree out. And then I came away from the window.”
“You didn’t see him leave?”
“No. It was chilly. I didn’t stay.”
“ ‘Clear as clear in the moonlight.’ From that window you can see all those earthworks and ongoings where they’re making a lake and a hillock?”
“Yes. Just out to the left.”
“Did you look, particularly, in that direction?”
“Yes. It was very beautiful. One could have abstracted something from it. The shapes were exciting.”
“Like a track across the snow leading into the distance?”
“Nothing as obvious as that. The whole field of snow — all the foreground — was quite unbroken.”
“Sure?”
“Quite sure. That’s what made it good as a subject.”
“Nothing like a wheel track and footprints anywhere to be seen? For instance?”
“Certainly not. Vincent had trundled round the house by the track and that was already tramped over.”
“Did you look out of your window again in the morning?”
“Yes, darling, I did. And there were no tracks anywhere across the snow. And I may add that after our telephone conversation, I went out of doors. I had a look at Nigel’s sculpture. It had been blurred by weathering, particularly on its windward side. Otherwise it was still in recognizable shape. I walked round the house past the drawing-room windows and had a look at last night’s ‘subject’ from that angle. No tracks anywhere on the snow. The paths round the house and the courtyard and driveway were trampled and muddy. The courtyard had been swept.”
“So nobody, during the night or morning, had gone near the earthworks.”
“Unless from the far side. Even then one would still have seen their tracks on the hillside.”
“And there had been no snowfall after midnight.”
“No. Only the north wind. The sky was still cloudless in the morning.”
“Yes. The Buster only blew up tonight. Thank you, my love. Leave me, now. I shan’t be long.”
“There isn’t—?”
“Well?”
“I suppose there isn’t anything I can do? Only stand and wait like those sickening angels?”
“I’ll tell you what you can do. You can fetch my small suitcase and go downstairs and collect every last bloody bit of Bill-Tasman’s famille verte. Don’t handle it any more than you can help. Hold the pieces by the edges, put them in the case, and bring them upstairs. I’ll be here. Will you do that?”
“Watch me.”
When she was established at her task he went to the table in the gallery where the vase had stood. He looked down and there, in aerial perspective, was the top of a standard lamp, a pool of light surrounding it, and within the pool, a pattern of porcelain shards, the top of Troy’s head, her shoulders, her knees and her long, thin hands moving delicately about the floor. She was directly underneath him.
A little table, Chinese, elegant but solid, stood against the gallery railing. The ebony pedestal on which the vase had rested was still in position. It had brought the base of the vase up to the level of the balustrade. Alleyn guessed that Hilary wished people in the hall to look up and see his lovely piece of famille verte gently signalling from above. As indeed it had signalled to him, much earlier in this long night. Before, he thought, it had hit him on the arm and then killed itself.
He turned on all the lights in the gallery and used a pocket torch that Wrayburn had lent him. He inspected the table, inch by inch, so meticulously that he was still at it when Troy, having finished her task, switched off the downstairs lamp and joined him.
“I suppose,” she said, “you’re looking for claw-marks.”
“Yes.”
“Found any?”
“Not yet. You go along. I’ve almost finished here. I’ll bring the case.”
And when, finally, just after Troy heard the stable clock strike one, he came to her, she knew it was not advisable to ask him if he had found any traces of Smartypants’s claws on the Chinese table.
Because clearly he had not.